There are two Kevin Spaceys: the actor of sensitivity, authority, and inner fire who won an Oscar for his haunting performance in the 1999 family drama American Beauty, and the hyperactive showman who devoured every piece of scenery that wasn’t nailed down in the 2007 London and Broadway revival of O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten. Both Spaceys can be found onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, where Sam Mendes’ broadly painted but ultimately powerful production of Richard III officially opened Wednesday night. It’s a battle between ruthless emotional honesty and shameless self-indulgence, and I’m happy to report that in the end, the better angels of the actor’s nature win out to create a portrait of Shakespeare’s murderous hunchback king that, for all its flaws, is nothing short of majestic.

The role of the “rudely stamp’d” Richard, who schemes, lies, and kills his way to the English crown with venomous fury, is, of course, an engraved invitation to overact. And Spacey has RSVP’d with an enthusiastic “Yes, sir!” He mugs, snarls, roars, sneers, and spits his way through the first half of this nearly three-and-a-half-hour-long production, combining the crabbed, scuttling gait and the gleeful malevolence of two of his most memorable screen psychopaths—those would be, respectively, Verbal Kint/Keyser Söze from The Usual Suspects and John Doe from Se7en—with the coked-up frenzy of the Wall Street creep he played in Working Girl. Spacey captures Richard’s dark humor—the frank asides and insinuating eyework that he tosses the audience’s way get laughs and make his treacherous motivations admirably clear. But he fails to capture the seductive magnetism that would make us believe that Lady Anne (a fine Annabel Scholey), whose husband he has recently dispatched, would give herself to him. And when he wails, “And this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, be resident in men like one another; And not in me: I am myself alone,” we understand his pain without feeling it.

Similarly, the first half of Mendes' production—the final installment of his Anglo-American Bridge Project, which has brought together actors from both sides of the Atlantic with varying degrees of success—is entertaining but not overburdened by subtlety or nuance. With its depiction of (literally) cut-throat politics and evil despotism, Shakespeare’s early history presents directors with an often irresistible temptation to draw explicit parallels between the last days of the War of the Roses and our own. From the moment we walk into the theater and are greeted by a curtain across the stage emblazoned with the word Now, it’s clear that Mendes has succumbed. He deploys a variety of theatrical gimmicks—from interstitial supertitles underscored by foreboding, Law & Order–style drums to a televised photo op of Richard at prayer, professing disinterest in becoming king with the sincerity of a Mormon millionaire-turned-presidential-candidate insisting he understands the fear of getting a pink slip—to make sure we understand that, as he puts it in a program note, “Shakespeare is indeed our contemporary.”

But then in the second half of the evening, something happens: Spacey’s performance and Mendes’ staging seem to be stripped to their essence, much like the whitewashed brick walls and peeling doors of **Tom Piper’**s poetically spare set. Mendes uses those aforementioned drums, this time played by onstage characters, and simple lighting effects (in the scene where Richard’s victims return to haunt his dreams) to evoke destiny closing in on Richard on his inexorable march to his doom. Spacey doesn’t exactly turn into a wallflower, but he dispenses with the histrionics and he digs deep to show us, in scene after harrowing scene, a man facing the horror of his deeds, the blackness of his soul, the completeness of his solitude, and the imminence of his death. Homicidal monsters—they're just like us. And, unlike the character he plays, all of the actor’s previous sins are instantly and completely forgiven. There are some fine performances by the rest of the cast, particularly by the women, but it’s Spacey’s performance that you will be unable to forget, for some of the wrong reasons and all of the right ones.